Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Saved from Annihilation by Catastrophe

I grew up during the Cold War, not the black-and-white 50s hide under your school desk years, consciously 1972 on, and not once did I fear nuclear annihilation. O! the existential fear! we all were purported to feel, I never felt once.

We're such miserable fucks, we're not going to kaboom in merciful minutes, we're gonna to flay each other alive for decades. This is where I strike some as suspect: regardless whether I think the impending slow, miserable, death of Corporate is justified, I have zero zeal for the flaying my complicit ass has earned and zero faith the survivors will join the Federation after Zefram Cochrane discovers warp drive.

Daily Gaddis:

The small apartment was as inoffensive as himself. Like the defiantly patternless botch of colors he wore upon his necktie, signal of his individuality to the neckties that he met screaming the same claim of independence from the innominate morass of their wearers, the apartment's claims to distinction were mass-produced flower- and hunting-prints, filling a need they had manufactured themselves, heavy furniture with neither the seductive ugliness of functional pieces nor the isolate dumb beauty of something chosen for itself: in matching, they fulfilled the first requirement, as did the hopeless style of his brown pleated trousers which matched his brown coat, double-breasted over a chest resigned to be forever hidden like a thing of shame, whitening to yellowness with the years so that to show it now would be indeed offensive. It was a part of the body which he had never learned to use, never having been so poor that he was forced to feel the strain and growth of its muscles in the expansion of labor; nor rich enough to feel it liberated in those games (requiring courts, eighteen-hole courses, bridle-paths) which rich people played. Totally unconscious of itself except when something went wrong, that body served only to keep his identity intact, and was kept covered, like this room, to offend no one.

A pinup of Rita Hayworth was taped
To the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
The Avant-garde makes me weep with boredom.
Horses are wishes, especially dark ones.
That's why twitches and fences.
That's why switches and spurs.
That's why the idiom of betrayal.
They forgive us.
Their windswayed manes and tails,
Their eyes,
Affront the winterscrubbed prairie
With gentleness.
They live in both worlds and forgive us.
I'll give you a hint: the wind in fits and starts.
Like schoolchildren when the teacher walks in,
The aspens jostle for their places
And fall still.
A delirium of ridges breaks in a blue streak:
A confusion of means
Saved from annihilation
By catastrophe.
A horse gallops up to the gate and stops.
The rider dismounts.
Do I know him?

We did, in fact, duck and cover, as late as Right Side of the Tracks Elementary School. Appropos of nothing.

We're far off of the Roddenberry continuity. We were supposed to have had World War IV by now. No Montana, no Alfre Woodard, no James Cromwell. Bummer, but the best we can say is that we're way behind Roddenberry.

I have no memory of ducking from anything except balls thrown at me running the bases at kickball at the school named after a town it's not actually in.*

And while I hated the movie Babe (though a four year old Planet insisted on watching it daily), I thought Zefram acquitted himself fine.

*Serendipitously, I thought about that school yesterday when I heard somebody on the car radio talking about the golf balls from lakes on golf courses business, which is what Gr*g L*wman told me he did for a living when I ran into him twenty or so years ago.